This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
As the expansion to The Talos Principle, my review on that game is worth referencing before you even consider the DLC; this DLC, while it is independent of the main game, assumes that the player has played the original game.
The events of the game take place after the end of the original game. Uriel, one of Elohim’s messengers, is tasked to go to Gehenna, a place where Elohim banished all the AI processes who didn’t follow his orders. This is the total sum of your interaction with Elohim; he speaks a few lines at the beginning and a few lines at the very, very end, but he receives no real additional characterization or focus.
Instead, this game focuses on the AI processes who are banished to Gehenna. The only way to interact with them is via their message boards, which they’ve set up on the terminals in Gehenna. As you free the various AI processes, you get more messages to read and possibly respond to on the boards, and uncover the secret of Gehenna.
Except that the secret is pretty obvious from the get-go – Gehenna is like any other internet community, and the game sort of centers around the situational irony/humor of reading a bunch of people in a community talking to each other on a messageboard, with its own internal rivalries and characters and such.
The problem is, this just isn’t very engrossing – your interactions with most of the characters is fairly sporadic, and there are 17 AI processes (plus Uriel himself) whom you interact with. The result is that none of them are particularly well-characterized, and while it works okay, I was not left caring about almost any of the characters. Honestly, only MrMulciber ended up seeming all that interesting, and while Admin was in principle interesting, in practice he is simply not developed well enough over the course of the game, nor does he exhibit the sort of personality you saw out of the Milton Library Assistant in the first game.
Moreover, because it is extremely obvious from early on what is going on, the game is basically entirely lacking in any sort of mystery or discovery. In the first game, you gradually uncover what is going on, as well as what your purpose is and why you are doing the things you’re doing, and what the purpose of the world is. Here, you hold all the answers from the beginning of the game, and over the course of the game you can comfort others as you free them (via the messageboard terminals; you cannot directly interact with anyone).
As a result of this, the game does not feel like it has anywhere near the same weight as the original game; the frame story is only mildly interesting and lacks the same sense of discovery or accomplishment, and there’s no mystery how it is all going to end. Indeed, the ending is extremely bare bones and weightless; there’s no final set of interactions with the NPCs before ascension to sum everything up, nor is there a particularly interesting or in-depth discussion with Admin in the same vein as what you got out of Milton. You don’t really care about Admin, who is the only character you have any meaningful choice with, and even that choice feels weightless because you just don’t care about him, and the whole ending only barely changes, with a few different words being spoken.
That being said, while this game’s story is weak, the puzzles here are actually quite good. As noted in my review of the original game, The Talos Principle seems like it runs out of ideas halfway through, then actually starts doing interesting things with puzzles again at the end. The Road to Gehenna proves that they actually had lots more interesting ideas for puzzles, as all of the puzzles in Road to Gehenna are fresh and interesting uses of the pieces from the original game. The puzzles in this are pretty thinky, and most of them don’t actually take that long to complete, unlike the long marathon puzzles which appeared at some points in the first game. Instead, they require you to use a few parts in a clever way. It is all about thinking about the puzzle pieces in new ways, and coming up with clever ways to solve puzzles which seemingly give you one fewer piece than they should. They also encourage you to abuse the level design in order to succeed, in ways that the original game mostly reserved for star puzzles.
There are 16 main puzzles, plus 16 star puzzles and 8 bonus puzzles, all of which are decent enough.
That being said, the puzzles aren’t perfect; while most of the star puzzles are better than the ones in the original game insofar that you can see the stars and the trick is figuring out how to get there, there still are a few hidden stars which basically constitute “run around searching for someplace that might have a star hidden in it.” There are, however, fewer such puzzles.
In the end, if you liked the puzzles in The Talos Principle, and want more of them, this DLC is for you.
If it was the plot/setting that attracted you, however, this expansion is lacking.… Expand
The Talos Principle: Road To GehennaYour Score0 out of 10User Score
